driving arcana

So last year I was in Helsinki for WorldCon and watched The Hugos on twitter in the hotel bar with David Levine and Mari Ness and it was wonderful, but because the stream for the show went down, I did not get to see Ursula’s amazing Whalefall acceptance speech. I’ve since read the dramatized version and it is downright inspiring.

It’s inspired me to write (what I hope will be) an equally entertaining acceptance speech, on the off chance that I ever win such an award. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In order to give the speech I must win.

In order to win, my work must be nominated

Friends, it is nomination season. The Hugo Awards will open for nominations soon, and the for SFWA members, the Nebulas are already open (but close February 15!) So, without further adieu, here are my works of fiction published in 2017, and the categories into which they fall for the 2018 award season.

(Note: category delineations were taken from the Hugo Awards info page. I could not find the respective information for the Nebulas, but I imagine it’s similar.)

NOVELETTE

Short story

Links will take you to where you can purchase/read the story or the anthology in which it first appeared. You can unlock both “Anomaly” and “Box’s Day” by pledging $5.00, and if you’re quick about cancelling after you’ve read them you can avoid being charged—though of course Patreon frowns at this practice. Obviously, if you can afford it I’d encourage you to wait until your pledge goes through and then cancel, but I’d rather you read the stories than not. If you want to, of course.

I started this in February, which is Black History Month, and I’m posting it here in March, which is Women’s History Month. Both subjects are pertinent to Selene, who is both. I’ve long wanted to do a sister-portrait to “Woman of Thunder” but was lacking the right visual inspiration for Selene. That came to me while writing one of the recent Driving Arcana stories, where there was a lot of lunar imagery and it occurred to me that a fun visual play could be done with a face side-lit by a full moon—in essence created two crescents. The fact that the moon itself does not shine, but only reflects the sunlight cast upon it, was also influential. People forget that the moon is also a dark one, but even in darkness we feel her pull.

What a month. I am going to make a blanket assumption that everyone reading this is at least as terrified as I am at the political climate change going on, which is almost as dangerous to the future of humanity as the natural climate change we have even less control over.

But in the tradition of artists in times of crisis, and I am going to keep on doggedly doing what I do, as hard and as best that I can. To that end I’m extremely pleased to announce that Heliopause put out three new titles this month! The long-overdue third rotation of Driving Arcana, Professor Odd #9, and last but not least the Perihelion 2017 issue of Apsis Fiction! You’ve probably already seen the covers, but I’m going to share them again, because I am so proud of them.

Looking forward to next month (tomorrow—eep!) things are going to be very busy on the Professor Odd front: we have Episode 10, “The Thousand Songs” coming out as a single, and—hopefully—the Complete Season 1 (episodes 1-6). The Season 1 volume is still in the process of being put together, but I can share with you the cover for “Thousand Songs” (which can also be found in Perihelion 2017).

It has been an interesting winter here in Oregon. Snowy and cold, we’ve had a minor respite these past ten days, but the prediction is for another good dump this week followed by rain—and just when the roads were beginning to recover! Oh well. It’s given me an opportunity to put to use the shoveling skills I honed cleaning up after horses as a teenager, and I’ve been keeping in practice for mountain biking by navigating the icy, slushy, snowy streets and bike/ped paths between my house and the gym, where I’m doing weight training and lap swimming. Gary Silver (my hardtail) has been tricked out with studded tires, fenders, lights, and flat pedals, so I can ride him in my snow boots. All this combined has rendered him a more reliable means of transportation that my poor little Fit, who performed beautifully in the snow and ice with her own studded tires, but was bested by the deep slush and has spent the last ten days hiding in my garage. But as this is what she often ends up doing even in good weather, it is of no great loss to me. My trusty Blue Sky Cycle Cart has been sufficient to haul the week’s groceries home from the nearby store, though dodging the potholes on the return journey (for the sake of the eggs) has made these trips quite exciting.

Bend is beginning to feel more like home, and less like some surreal, never-ending vacation. Part of this I am sure is that I have set to work in earnest on the titles scheduled for release later this year, and my studio is at last getting the use it so richly deserves.

It’s been a very busy summer and autumn. How busy? Well, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to blog here at all! But this is okay; I’ve been doing lots of writing instead—and I have the books to show for it!

First, there’s the second installment of Driving Arcana stories, Rotation Two, which is out from Heliopause and available on all channels. You can pick it up from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Nook, Kobo, or have your local bookstore special-order it. (And yes, for Christmas shoppers, it’s available on Amazon Prime!)

Second, “The Dogs of Canary Island” which debuted this summer in Aphelion 2015 is now available as a single! Search it on any of your preferred online book vendors, or find handy links over on it’s Heliopause page.

Also worth noting: I now have a Red Bubble shop! You can find the original cover art for Odd 7 there as a print, along with many more pieces! Do take a look!

On the convention front I attended Sasquan earlier this year, which was a blast. The WM and I took a road trip up through Oregon to get to it (we’re in California) and I got to visit some old friends on the way up and down. The greatest highlight of that con was probably Helsinki’s win for WorldCon in 2017, though the whole weekend was delightful—Mordor-like weather notwithstanding.

All that seems a long way away now, and never more so than last weekend when I was in Chicago for Midwest FurFest. This was a mind-boggling experience as I got to meet several artists whom I’ve long admired, as well as reconnecting with old friends. I took a short holiday in the city itself to visit the Shedd Aquarium, the results of which can be found on my tumblr, here, here, and here. Chicago is a wonderful city and I cannot recommend the Shedd enough. Also, Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co. and Smoque are two excellent choices for food.

Looking forward I have the usual Holiday tasks still in front of me, as well as the impending release of Perihelion 2016 next month. Also next month I’ll be traveling to Boston for Anthro New England, where I’ll have a table and will be dealing next to my partner-in-crime art, Mary Capaldi. I’ll also be doing a reading, and probably running around as Tachyon a lot.

So many things! Oh, and I’ve got the second Sir Camilla novel to finish in the mean time. Better get crackin’. I’ll leave you with the newly-unveiled Perihelion 2016 cover, and the usual reminder that twitter is the best place to follow me these days, and I post WIPs and other pictures to my tumblr.

Raise your sword up, woman of thunder’cause they’ll try to take you down tonightGet your arms up, girl of wonderyou gotta chase ’em down before they fly

A personal piece I’ve been working on, on and off (but mostly off) since September of last year. This one features Clara, one of the three main protagonists from my Driving Arcanaseries (Rotation One available here!) with her trademark sword and custom Yamaha VMAX, Unicorn. Now I’m thinking I ought to do matching portraits for Selene and Jill, the other two leads, but considering how long this one took me, I don’t know when that will be. XD

Above is the cover for the first collection of Driving Arcana stories, fittingly titled Rotation One. It is available as an eBook from Amazon, iTunes, Barnes and Noble and Kobo, and you can also get the paperback edition via Amazon or order it through your local bookstore. The relevant links can be found over at Heliopause.

About the Story

If you follow my twitter, you’ve probably heard me mention the name Driving Arcana in relation to my word count tweets. I’ve been writing a lot of it lately, and Rotation One is only the first three of nine stories which make up Wheel 1 (Arcana is the name of a truck, so the volumes are called Wheels, and a small collection is a Rotation. I had considered calling the individual stories Spokes but thought better of it). There will be fiveWheels all told, each consisting of nine novella-length stories. So it’s early days yet as far as this series is concerned.

Yes, what about the series, then? Well, Driving Arcana was born out of my frustration with a certain television show that, while it had many good qualities, utterly failed in the representation of women, people of color, skeptical thinking, women, realistic U.S. landscapes, women, and…

You get the idea.

Also drawing inspiration from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (in the road trip sense, not the dude-gets-eaten-by-a-vagina sense) (sorry was that a spoiler? sorry, sorry), originally I had imagined Driving Arcana to be another serial webcomic, like I had already done with Angeldevil and Year of the God-Fox. What the latter of the two taught me, however, was that if I wanted to actually make a story as epic and far-reaching as Driving Arcana into a reality, it would have to be through pure letters.

So it was, in the fall of 2012, that I began writing the first episode (I think of the stories as being like hour-long TV episodes) as a distraction from my other two major series (Professor Odd and Bouragner Felpz). I had intended them to be short, fun things that wouldn’t require a lot of energy or research.

Ha ha ha.

Driving Arcana shares some similarities with Professor Odd in the style and construction of the episodes in that there is a small main cast who travel around and have adventures, with a different set of guest stars in each story. There is more of an over-arching tale to Driving Arcana, however, though it is revealed slowly, and I have so far refrained from writing “cliff-hanger episodes.”

Another feature of Driving Arcana are the songs. At the end of each story there is an original poem, a bit like an end-credits song, that is evocative of the preceding story. The trick to know is that they are not really poems: they are songs and they can be sung to the tunes of real songs that I listened to while brainstorming the series.

I had constructed for myself a lengthy playlist of songs which I felt were in the spirit of Driving Arcana. This list was originally a mix of Eurythmics and Lady GaGa, but has since been fine-tuned as I figured out more and more about the story, and it now contains songs from everyone from Jefferson Airplane to David Bowie to Katy Perry.

It must be said I picked these songs for their feel, not their lyrics, and I was a little dismayed to find that, when examined, the existing lyrics did not match the world I had created at all. Besides, since I didn’t wish to get sued six ways from Sunday, I couldn’t actually include them in the books. So I wrote my own songs, though I carefully made them scan to real tunes. I also made up fake bands and artists, who are referred to in the stories themselves, to help flesh out the world. Two of these later made in-person appearances, and have become characters in their own right.

Driving Arcana can best be described as dark, contemporary fantasy, with a light dusting of horror. There is some blood and gore and themes such as racism, sexism are tackled head-on rather than danced around, but I have endeavored to keep the language PG-13. I’d like these books to be easily accessible to older kids and teenagers as well as adults because they address issues (like racism, sexism and homophobia and transphobia and a whole lot of other bad stuff) that are usually relegated to adult-targeted books, because these issues are relevant and worth thinking about no matter what your age.

About the Characters

The main cast of Driving Arcana consists of three women, a truck and a motorcycle. The women are (in no particular order; they are all equally important) Jill Hamilton, Clara Nordstern and Selene Shields. The truck is a bright red 2010 Heavy Duty 3500 Ram Laramie—which for those of you who don’t know trucks, is this hulk of a vehicle—named Arcana. He (yes, he) was based on a real truck belonging to a friend of mine. I wanted a truck that was really huge. A beast. And one that had an animal emblem (the Ram part of him becomes very important). Having become intimately acquainted with my friend’s truck, I knew a Ram 3500 “duallie” was exactly the vehicle I wanted for Jill and co., even if it wasn’t the most practical car for a road trip across the continental United States (which is what happens in the series). And the motorcycle is a heavily modified prototype Yamaha VMAX named Unicorn. Unicorn gets her name from the spike of anodized aluminum welded to her headlamp, and is Clara’s preferred mode of transportation. I chose the Yamaha VMAX because I wanted something as big and powerful as a Harley, but not a Harley, and not something as famous as the Hyabusa or Ninja. The VMAX also nicely straddles the line between cruiser and racer, which again is not the ideal thing to ride across the country on, but it fits Clara’s character.

Clara is really Claymore Nordstern. She is the youngest of the three, well over six feet tall, wears all black biking leathers (even in Death Valley), is bald, pale-skinned and blue-eyed, and fights monsters using her namesake sword. She’s taciturn by nature, socially awkward, and there is a lot about her past we don’t know at the beginning—the long, slow reveal of her character is a major part of the main arch of Driving Arcana.

Selene Shields is named after a moon goddess and the first U.S. woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing. I imagined her to be a friendly and talkative counterpoint to the Giant Mountain of Ice that was Clara, but the more I wrote, the more I realized Selene plays a lot close to her chest, in her own way. It is through Selene, who is both black and gay, that a lot of the major social issues are explored. She being a triple threat of marginalized people was partly accidental, but once I realized it, it informed a lot about her character and how she reacts to the things the group encounters. Selene is neither exceptionally strong, big, or fast, but she’s an expert shot and an excellent tactician. Her favorite weapon is a vintage 1963 Winchester Model 12 trench gun (an homage to the Winchester brothers from Supernatural), named Elvis.

Finally, there is Jill Hamilton, whose full name of Gillian Sarah Hamilton is an amalgam tribute to three legendary genre actresses: Gillian Anderson (of the X-Files), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) and Linda Hamilton (Terminator 1 and 2). If any of them could be said to be the “main” character, it would probably be Jill, but only because she serves as the audience’s entry point to the story. Jill, unlike Clara and Selene, is not a fighter, but a scientist, and it is through her that the repeating theme of science vs. magic is explored. One of the big motivations for me to write Driving Arcana (aside from frustration) was that I wanted to see what would happen if a proper, skeptical, rational atheist encountered a unicorn. The result spawned a series that I don’t see myself finishing for several years.

Jill is also unique in that her physical appearance remains largely up to the reader. There are a few features (the presence of hair, glasses, and her being the smallest) that are mentioned, but for the most part I wanted the reader to be able to put whatever face or color on her that they wanted. I also wrote her this way so that, in the unlikely event of Driving Arcana being adapted into a live-action production, the role of Jill could be cast without any regards as to the prospective actress’s race.

More to explore…

The world of Driving Arcana, though it is ostensibly not that different from our own, has already caused me to doodle a lot of sketches and concepts, most of which I haven’t shared. In the coming days, however, in honor of the release of Rotation One, I’ll be doing a series of Driving Arcana “bonus feature” post over on my tumblr in which I’ll share some of these drawings, and also the songs for Rotation One and my notes on writing them. You can find them under the “driving arcana bonus” tag.

In addition to the three stories found in Rotation One, the fourth, “Sex, Blood and Rock ‘n’ Roll” can be found in the latest Apsis Fiction, while the fifth will appear in the upcoming Perihelion issue.

As of this writing all the stories for Wheel 1 are completed—in the form of first drafts or better—and will appear first in future Apsis Fiction issues.

Links to available titles and a nifty episode guide can all be found on the Driving Arcana page over at Heliopause Productions.

I’m long overdue for a good, old fashioned update. No philosophical musings or bitter rants today, just some straight up information.

I may have mentioned this before, but I recently got a tumblr. It is built off the old Year of the God-Fox tumblr; since the comic is complete now there is little to talk about. I, however, keep on doing things. And I blog about them on tumblr. I also try to keep it well queued with pretty pictures—both my own and inspiring pictures done by other people. If you like your updates from me a bit more wordy and picturific, go forth and follow!

There is an interview with me over on the Paperblanks blog, which is a pretty fun read. Maybe you already saw it mentioned on twitter, but if you missed it in May here it is again. Ostensibly I was supposed to write about how much I love their journals (which I do, and I did) but there ended up being a lot of interesting biographical stuff about me and my work. It’s rather better than the About page on this website, actually. Give it a read if you were ever curious about anything about me, ever. And the books really are amazing.

I have a new bike. She is a 2012 Trek Carbon Lush, so I named her Mary Sue (after the fanfiction trope of overpowered female characters who solve all the problems and whom all the guys fall in love with; my Mary Sue is an overpowered mountain bike that solves all my singletrack problems, and whom all the other mountain-biking dudes fall in love with). Below is a picture of me and her on one of our rides earlier this year. I need to do a proper write-up for this bike, it is so amazing. Perhaps that is a post for tumblr?

I also have some things to say about the amazing shirt and jersey I’m sporting in this photo. They are both by YMX and are absolutely amazing.

After that I’ll be flying across the pond this August for LonCon3 (World Con) in London, England. I’ll have more pictures in the art show there, and if things work out I’ll also be one of their Artists in Residence. I plan to doodle funny things in people’s conbooks, if they’ll let me. Also (and this is still a little tentative) I’m hoping to organize a little meet-and-greet for fans of Diana Wynne Jones, who would be turning 80 on the 16th of August (Saturday of World Con). Still thinking of fun things to do with this, but I know we’ll have a book giveaway and possibly a Witchie Dance lesson/performance. If you’re a DWJ fan attending LonCon3, please contact me if you have any ideas or suggestions!

After LonCon3 I hope over to Berlin for Eurofurence the next weekend. This will be a 100% fun con for me—no panels to run, nothing in the art show, and not selling anything. But if you find me I might draw you a surprise picture.

That is as far as I can look into my future at the moment. At the same time as preparing for these conventions I’m also hard at work on the Aphelion issue of Apsis Fiction, as well as the first Driving Arcana book. I hope to have both out in a month or so. But I can show you their covers now!

And boy, do I have words about the Rotation One cover—but those will have to wait. Lots of work to be done. I am going to try to keep this blog a bit more active, however, so you can look forward to hearing about all the things I mentioned wanting to talk about in this post.

Or not, if that’s not your thing. Look, one last link: here is a blog devoted to beautiful men and cats. It doesn’t get much better than that.

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Goldeen Ogawa is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. To keep tabs on what she is doing you can follow her on twitter @GrimbyTweets, and on Tumblr. You can also send her an email at goldeenogawa@gmail.com.

Lately I’ve been having thoughts on the process of my writing, and jotted down these notes as a reminder for myself of what it is I am doing. I look forward to coming back to them in a few years, to see if they still hold true. In the mean time, perhaps they can provide you with some amusement—and a peak into the churning muddle that is this author’s mind.

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Writing fiction is different from any other form of art I’ve encountered in that so much of it happens internally, where no one—not even the author, sometimes—can tell what’s going on. With drawing, there is the physical act of creating the image, which people can watch. It can be fascinating to watch an artist draw, or paint, and see the picture appear, as if by magic, on the page. And at the end, you have a finished picture that is immediately obvious to everyone around you. “Here I am,” the picture says. “This person can draw.”

I’ve noticed that it is easier it is to talk about my painting than it is to talk about my writing. It’s easier to show someone a picture and say “I did that” than it is to convince them to read a story. A picture doesn’t take much time to look at, but a story takes time to read. Furthermore, most people can tell at a glance whether or not they like the picture, and then decide how long they want to look at it. With a story, sometimes you can’t tell until the very end, and it can be a bitter disappointment when it lets you down.

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Writing is an invisible sort of art that happens inside the author’s head, but also somewhere on the page, between the words and sentences and paragraphs. You’re not just painting a picture when you write a story, you’re crafting a whole landscape, with a road winding around in it, and readers walk down this road and experience your story.

I’ve been writing a lot of short stories and novellas lately and watching how my language changes from one story to the next. It helps that I have three distinct series running at the same time. The Bouragner Felpz stories are a bit of an early 20th Century pastiche with British mannerisms and spelling and a first person narrator with a storytelling style all her own.

The Professor Odd series is more American in tone, even though the principal characters are European. Professor Odd is more informal than Bouragner Felpz and has the (suitably) odd quirk that, though I have several point-of-view characters to serve as hosts for my third-person eye, I never use Professor Odd herself. The closest we get to the inside of her head is when she tells one of the POV characters something.

Finally, Driving Arcana, which is more like Professor Odd than not, still has a distinct style. While Professor Odd takes place in far-off universes, aboard spaceships, and on alien planets, Driving Arcana is set in a near-future version of the United States. The subject matter is therefore different, as are the types of stories I can tell. This in turn affects the language I use.

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Stories are communication, and like communication between two people, there is more to it than just words and their definitions. In person we communicate with our tone, our hand gestures, and our expressions. In writing, word choice can add subtle information to a sentence and fill out the landscape with hues and texture, subtly telling the reader about the nature of the landscape they’re in, and what’s in store.

Sometimes I read stories and I just know nothing too bad is going to happen. I can tell from the style of the writing. These always frighten me, because there is nothing quite as bad as rolling happily along until the writer pulls the rug out from under you and has something horrible happen at the end. It’s a betrayal, I think. If you’re not going to put up huge warning signs saying “cliff ahead,” at least have the decency to warn about the cliff in other ways. Maybe have some other cliffs looming about, or places where the road has been washed away. Things like that.

On the other hand, most writers like to keep their readers on edge, and so they write in a way that says “Could be cliffs here. Could be lots of cliffs. You don’t know.” I find these stories particularly satisfying, especially when at the end, everyone gets over the ravine unharmed.

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Stories are like puzzles to me. I turn the pieces this way and that, trying to see how they fit. I’ve become wary of pushing them in too hard, since sometimes, with enough shoving, I can get a piece to fit, but that doesn’t make it the right one. The right piece slips in easily, and it can take a while to find it.

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Stories are like four-dimensional paintings. They stretch out through time and space, into the limitless expanse of the human imagination. They are not like a performance: all the work happens behind the curtain, and when it lifts there is a book. But though the story exists then, it does not truly come alive until someone picks it up and reads it.

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The final piece to any story is the reader. It is the reader that gives it life, it is the reader that imbues it with its ultimate reality. Furthermore, each reader makes a slightly different reality, because everyone has differing experiences and opinions that color their perception of the world. And what are stories but little worlds, waiting to be activated?

Stories are a bit like a magic trick with a lot of audience participation. When I am writing, I find myself, like a magician, thinking not only about how things appear to the characters in the story, but how they will appear to the people reading it. What words I can use to spark the fires in my readers’ heads, so that their imaginations rise up and meet mine, creating a world even more vivid and realistic than I ever could on my own.

I can write a story much like a composer writes music, but it is the reader who plays it. Every time someone reads a story, a performance happens inside their heads. And they are the ones making that happen.

I think this is why reading is so much more mentally stimulating than, say, watching a movie. Because when you’re reading, you are actively participating in creating the story—even if you don’t come up with a single new idea or thought of your own, even though the writer did all that for you—you are the one who is making it real.

I can sing in the woods with no one but the trees to hear and the sound will still happen. But there will never be that magic of images and feelings exploding out of nowhere that happens when a singing voice meets the ears of a receptive listener. In the same way I can write a story and never publish it, never show it to anyone, and it will still exist, but there will never be the same, sudden magic that happens when a book is picked up and read.

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All art sparks something within us. All art is transportive. But I think stories are unique in that, though they may carry their readers off, at the same time, the readers are carrying them.

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Goldeen Ogawa is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. To keep tabs on what she is doing you can follow her on twitter @GrimbyTweets, and on Tumblr. You can also send her an email at goldeenogawa@gmail.com.

As explained in a previous post, for the month of November 2013 I am undertaking a modified version of the NaNoWriMo challenge. Instead of writing a 50,000 word novel in a month, I am simply aiming to write 50,000 words of fiction (excluding blog posts like this one and other non-story writing, such as introductions and blurbs). I have allotted myself 22 days to write these 50,000 words (allowing for travel and conventions), meaning a daily average of 2,273 words per day. Words can go towards any number of stories I have in the works, in any proportion, but they must all be stories I intend to finish and publish one day. I am therefore recording, every day, the number of words I’ve written for each story, the total number of words that day, and how many words I am over or under my daily minimum average. I am also keeping a running total of how many words I’ve written and how many days it took, how many words I’ve left to write, and how many days to write them in, as well as a tally of how many words I am over or under the minimum average for the total day.

My entries for the past week (November 8th-14th) can be found below. Entries for Week 1 can be found here.

FRIDAY November 8
2,644 for Driving Arcana 1.5
TOTAL: 2,644 of 2,273371 over minimum average

Current total: 24,631 in (8) days6,447 over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 25,369 in (14) days

SATURDAY November 9*
218 for God or Aliens song
Completed Driving Arcana 1.5
TOTAL: 218 of 0218 over minimum average

Current total: 24,849 in (8) days6,655 over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 25,151 in (14) days

SUNDAY November 10*
0
TOTAL: 0 of 00 remaining to minimum average

*The 9th and 10th were scheduled Non Active Days and thus do not have a minimum average nor do are they counted among the 22 Active Days.

Current total: 26,332 in (9) days5,865 over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 23,668 in (13) days

TUESDAY November 12
1,930 for Star Walker
1,014 for Felpz 2.8
TOTAL: 2,944 of 2,273671 over minimum average

Current total: 29,276 in (10) days6,536 over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 20,724 in (12) days

WEDNESDAY November 13
4,868 for Felpz 2.8
TOTAL: 4,868 of 2,2732,595 over minimum average

Current total: 34,144 in (11) days9,131 over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 15,856 in (11) days

THURSDAY November 14
4,827 + THE END for Felpz 2.8
TOTAL: 4,827 of 2,2732,554 over minimum average

Total words for Week 2: 16,984

Current total: 38,971 in (12) days11,685over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 11,029 in (10) days

A bit down from Week 1, mostly due to the fact that I wrote practically nothing on Saturday and nothing at all on Sunday. But that’s okay: I planned for those days to be non productive. Also, what is encouraging is that, although I was under my minimum average on Monday, I was able to bounce back over the remaining week, and actually extended my word-lead. At this rate I really only need to write a little over one thousand words a day to come in on schedule, but of course I’m going to reach for the stretch goals (TBA).

I expect the weekly total will go down again next week, and the week after, as I will be traveling for Midwest FurFest for part of both of them. But that’s why the Day Counter is set at 22 instead of 30, after all.

But hey, 11,000+ words ahead of schedule. Not bad, I say! The challenge now is seeing if I can finish Professor Odd 8 by the end of the month. (Hint: I’m going to try REALLY HARD.)

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Goldeen Ogawa is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. You can follow her daily progress on the 50k word challenge on her twitter, @GrimbyTweets, and you can also email her at goldeenogawa@gmail.com—but understand why if she doesn’t respond right away.

As explained in a previous post, for the month of November 2013 I am undertaking a modified version of the NaNoWriMo challenge. Instead of writing a 50,000 word novel in a month, I am simply aiming to write 50,000 words of fiction (excluding blog posts like this one and other non-story writing, such as introductions and blurbs). I have allotted myself 22 days to write these 50,000 words (allowing for travel and conventions), meaning a daily average of 2,273 words per day. Words can go towards any number of stories I have in the works, in any proportion, but they must all be stories I intend to finish and publish one day. I am therefore recording, every day, the number of words I’ve written for each story, the total number of words that day, and how many words I am over or under my daily minimum average. I am also keeping a running total of how many words I’ve written and how many days it took, how many words I’ve left to write, and how many days to write them in, as well as a tally of how many words I am over or under the minimum average for the total day.

Current total: 7,798 in (3) days979over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 42,202 in (19) days

MONDAY November 4
1,066 for Driving Arcana 1.5
1,106 for Desta and Amar
926 for Star Walker
TOTAL: 3,098of 2,273825 over minimum average

Current total: 10,896 in (4) days1,804 over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 39,104 in (18) days

TUESDAY November 5
1,945 for Driving Arcana 1.5
610 for Amar and Desta
2,030 for Star Walker
TOTAL: 4,585 of 2,2732,312 over minimum average

Current total: 15,481 in (5) days4,116over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 34,519 in (17) days

WEDNESDAY November 6
2,495 for Driving Arcana 1.5
1,082 for Amar and Desta
TOTAL: 3,577 of 2,2731,304over minimum average

Current total: 19,058 in (6) days5,420 over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 30,942 in (16) days

THURSDAY November 7
163 + THE END for Amar and Desta
1,589 for Driving Arcana 1.5
1,177 for Star Walker
TOTAL: 2,929of 2,273656 over minimum average

Current total: 21,987 in (7) days6,076 over minimum average (total)
Remaining total: 28,013 in (15) days

A very good week overall. It was a bit daunting at first, but I find the more I write, the more excited I get about the stories I am writing.

*

Goldeen Ogawa is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. You can follow her daily progress on the 50k word challenge on her twitter, @GrimbyTweets, and you can also email her at goldeenogawa@gmail.com—but understand why if she doesn’t respond right away.